Top 8 Backup and Recovery Software Tools 2017

IT Central Station’s crowdsourced user review platform helps technology decision makers around the world to better connect with peers and other independent experts who provide advice without vendor bias.

“Instant VM restore is one of the coolest functions within this product. It lets you within this product. It lets you verify a backup with the least amount of effort, especially when backing up a VM before running some maintenance.

Previously, a backup expert would be required to get a backup product to function properly.

With Veeam Backup and Restore, things are so simple and efficient that you do not need to spend hours on end configuring the product. This allows engineers to focus on other business critical applications.”

“The direct SAN backup integration can be perfected by improving the snapshot removal mechanism and process from the storage volumes. This will prevent stale snapshots from accumulating on the data stores, which in turn consumes precious space.”

#2 HPE Data Protector

IT Central Station users rank HPE Data Protector as the number two solution of Q2 2017, but what do users really think of HPE Data Protector?

“The granularity of brick-level restore functionality is very valuable. We receive approximately 10 restore requests on a daily basis for your typical file/folder restore, with the odd Exchange mailbox restore request thrown in, just to keep me on my toes.

Backing up to disk (HPE StoreOnce 4900) has been valuable in reducing the man-hours in managing the backups, with the added bonus of backup replication for all jobs to the opposite HPE StoreOnce.

Historically, all our backups onsite backed up directly to LT04 tapes. This method brought a lot of its own challenges: tape management, costs, man-hours; not to forget having to ensure all our backups completed within the scheduled backup window throughout the week/weekend was tight.”

“Before I had this product, I was doing backups one disk at a time using the tool that comes with Microsoft. I do database work and my projects are large enough that I need multiple disk drives and it was just getting to be too much record-keeping.

In some cases, I didn't do my backups manually when I should've, and I lost things because of it. Acronis allowed me to organize all that and automate it and so now, my backups happen automatically; I don't even have to think about them.”

“The newer version 12 was a little bit hard to set up and get licensed. When I went to version 12, the actual license page wouldn’t come up in an Internet Explorer browser, so we had to change to another browser as a workaround to get to the licensing page. That happened on at least two different installations of that version.”

“The lockdown feature has been extremely valuable. We have been able to ensure backups of company data for compliance, and prevent users from changing that.

It has improved our ability to have complete backups for people on legal hold and also ensuring everyone is backed up for compliance reasons. The ease of use has helped our users be sufficient and cut down on technician time.”

“We have deployed our Commvault environment on-premise and into Azure and this has given us the ability to not only make use of cloud storage for long term retention, but also achieve the same level of protection as our on-premise systems for our Azure hosted IaaS VMs. We have also deployed backups from Commvault in Azure to our Office 365 install base, too.

The cloud integration is a massive win for us, giving us a single backup service for all of our on-premise and cloud systems.”

“As we have used and scaled out the product SQL, integration with the company’s automated scripts proved to be a challenge. The Workflow feature is your only solution and therefore, you end up with a mix of scripts then relying on the product's workflow to run and return expected results allowing your scripts to then continue. Not a very clean solution, yet.”

#6 IBM Spectrum Protect

IT Central Station users rank IBM Spectrum Project as the number six backup and recovery solution of Q2 2017.

“IBM is a partner-friendly company which has open API that one can use. In our case, we have built solutions which have helped many customers who use API to protect databases and applications with Spectrum Protect that IBM doesn't protect today.

“Its most valuable feature is probably the variety of features it has. You have the ability to perform a lot of actions with a single software solution.Specific features that I could not do without are SLPs for replication and duplication control and AIR which makes DR easy.

Our only other frame of reference is switching from BE to NBU. We got more advanced control of backups and restores by switching to a full-fledged enterprise solution.”

“The last releases introduced a simplified backup of MS SQL and Oracle. I'd like to have a more user-friendly interface for recovering MS SQL. It would be nice to have native support for MySQL and PostgreSQL. Veritas should increase the number of supported storage options.”

#8 Rubrik

IT Central Station users rank Rubrik as the number eight solution of Q2 2017, but what do users really think of the solution?

“There have been many changes to how our organization has been able to approach backup and recovery thanks to Rubrik. We have been able to reduce the time for recovery, which is invaluable because it not only frees up our time to move on to other things, but it truly makes our customers feel that they are important and given “special treatment.””

8 Comments

- Veeam is good for VM backups. But cannot really cover other needs. Licencing seems to follow Oracle usages, pay attention to you...

- Spectrum Protect is able to cover much more data than all other ones, due to its DB2 database. This ability to perform is why it is installed on most of large organisations.

- Commvault has a good but not sexy interface and can address a lot of different platforms. But it is hard to fix as soon as any problem occurs while it only have reports tools and no direct queries.

- Arcserve UDP is a good product for medium market and easy to use but is not mentioned here.

- Netvault from Quest is very cheap and can be a good solution in simple environments.

- Windows VSS is still getting a l,ot of problems so that snapshots cannot been created. This leads to failures for all VM backup tools mentioned here or other ones. No good solution since 2000 year and till now. Impressive !

We have got some others software on our customer's sites, but they are mostly not satisfactory about their reliability, or the support is ugly or not reachable. Some backup softwares are emerging and deserve to be tested.

Networker is an old traditional software able to backup files. But it has evolved too slowly, even after EMC bought the "Legato" company. Very few are using it.

Avamar is another EMC purchase: It allows Virtual machines backup. Like all other ones, it allows source deduplication before data are sent to the server. This dedup code is from open source. Avamar can be mostly found at EMC storage customers sites due to EMC marketing.

We use Quest RapidRecovery. For the most part, we have always been able to restore files, folders, exchange emails. We don't have Oracle and, don't backup any Linux devices.
Current version seems stable and I don't have many issues. Core servers do well with 8 CPUs, 32GB of RAM. I run hourly snapshots 24x7 on most vms., replication to a remote core, and vm exports to a separate SAN. I typically have 10-12 vms backing up per core.